2005 Maharashtra flooding

From a scenario where acute drought plagued parts of Vidarbha and Marathwada, the situation changed dramatically in the course of a week from July 21, when unusually heavy rains lashed the coastal areas of Konkan and Western Ghats.

On July 26, when the highest ever rainfall recorded in the last 100 years in the country battered the sub-urban Mumbai and Thane, Maharashtra experienced one of the worst floods in its history.

In Mumbai, water levels rose rapidly within three-four hours, submerging the roads and railway tracks. The traffic was completely immobilized. All the low-lying areas in the city were heavily. Water flooded many houses, and people lost all their possessions.

Floods claimed almost 1,100 lives in the state, most of them coming from urban concentrations of Mumbai (454) and Thane (224).

There was no electricity in Mumbai sub-urban and Thane districts. As the telephone exchanges came under water, the phones stopped working. Mobile phones were also not accessible

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Image: File photo shows men supplying water bottles to residents stuck in a water logged society in MumbaiPhotographs: Adeel Halim AH/VM/KI/Reuters

The 2004 tsunami

An undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, produced a tsunami that caused one of the biggest natural disasters in modern history. Over 200,000 people are known to have lost their lives.

The wall of water fanned out across the Indian Ocean at high speed and slammed into coastal areas with little or no warning roughly two hours after the earthquake.

According to the Indian government, almost 11,000 people were killed in the tsunami while over 5,000 went missing and presumed dead.

The waves completely levelled villages and devastated cities along the south eastern coast. The vast majority of the casualties came from Tamil Nadu. Nagapattinam district was the worst hit region of Tamil Nadu, accounting for over half of the deaths (5,500) from the tsunami on the Indian mainland.

In the days that followed, more than a dozen aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.2 tremor two hours after the main shock, continued to shake Kashmir. Earthquake-triggered landslides destroyed many houses on hillsides and blocked roads.

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Image: A Kashmiri woman holds her injured child outside a hospital in Karnah near the LOCPhotographs: Desmond Boylan/Getty Images

The 2003 heat wave

Between May-June 2003, scorching heat killed more than 1,200 people across India.

Andhra Pradesh state's Nalgonda district alone accounted for over 200 deaths as temperatures soared over 48 degrees Celsius in some places. Most of the victims were homeless rickshaw pullers and street hawkers

It was only in the second week of June that the country got some respite from the heat wave with the arrival of the monsoons.

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Image: A homeless woman takes cover from the sun in a pipe as she fans her babyPhotographs: B Mathur/Reuters

The 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy

Exactly how many died in the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 remains a mystery.

In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, a rolling wind carried a poisonous gray cloud from the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

Forty tons of toxic gas (Methy-Iso-Cyanate, MIC) was accidentally released from Union Carbide's Bhopal plant, which leaked and spread throughout the city.

The result was a nightmare that still has no end, residents awoke to clouds of suffocating gas and began running desperately through the dark streets, victims arrived at hospitals; breathless and blind.

The lungs, brain, eyes, muscles as well as gastro-intestinal, neurological, reproductive and immune systems of those who survived were severely affected. When the sun rose the next morning, the magnitude of devastation was clear. Dead bodies of humans and animals blocked the street, leaves turned black and a smell of burning chilli peppers lingered in the air.

On the first day, the government counted 400 dead and unofficial sources said 500. The second day, the gap widened. The government figures rose to 550 while unofficial figures jumped to 1,200. By the end of January 1985, the government was counting 1,430 dead while newspapers all over the world and in India were quoting the unofficial figure of about 2,500.

In its petition in the US courts, the government has claimed 1,700 dead.

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Image: An aged blind horror-struck woman lifts her hands on October 12, 1987, near Bhopal, as she recalls the death-night of the Bhopal gas disaster which took place on December 3, 1984Photographs: Reuters